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Re: Rolleyes News of The Day

From Boortz this morning...

1. Steve learns to weld.
2. Steve would rather be an artist than working in a machine shop
3. Steve obtains some scrap metal and starts welding it together in odd shapes which he declares to be art.
4. Steve can't find anyone who will voluntarily pay for the piles of scrap metal he has welded together.
5. Steve changes his name to Stephano and drops his last name.
6. Still nobody will buy Stephano's art, though there is one Buckhead matron who has taken a rather prurient interest in some of Stephan's other talents.
7. The Buckhead matron allows Stephano to place a pile of scrap metal in her garden and begins to refer to it as a sculpture.
8. Buckhead socialites, after encountering Stephano's "sculpture", and desiring to pander to the matron's artistic tastes, decide that Stephan is being greatly wronged because nobody will pay him for his artistic efforts.
9. The buzz among the Buckhead social set is heard in the halls of the Atlanta City Council and the arts community.
10. A sense of anger builds that we have yet another artist in our midst who simply cannot manage to find a willing buyer in a free market environment.
11. Stephano and his backers become increasingly frustrated with the lack of respect the great unwashed have for his artistic talents.
12. The arts community -- which, by the way, won't buy any of Stephano's art either -- tells Atlanta's political leaders that Atlanta simply cannot survive or be considered a world class international city unless Stephano's "art" is displayed citywide.
13. A plan is hatched to use the police power of the Atlanta city government to fun the purchase of Stephano's piles of junk.
14. The city seizes money from residents and writes some fat checks to Stephano for more artwork.
15. Stephano, no longer needing to service the needs of the Buckhead matron, tells her to find another cabana boy.
16. Atlanta residents wake up one morning wondering when someone is going to come along and remove those piles of scrap metal someone left in their neighborhood overnight.

Its not just Atlanta and don't get me wrong, I love art in public places (OK, most art... particularly bronze sculptures and granite carvings)... just think its a great way for people with loads of money to put their name on a plaque, not something that should be funded by taxpayers.

Re: Rolleyes News of The Day

Thats today's funniest so far. Man is this ever classic

8. Buckhead socialites, after encountering Stephano's "sculpture", and desiring to pander to the matron's artistic tastes, decide that Stephan is being greatly wronged because nobody will pay him for his artistic efforts.

Re: Rolleyes News of The Day

An Iraq spending bill Congress will vote on Thursday has an Eagle Mountain mother angry, but not about war spending. The huge, 124.1 billion dollar appropriation bill also contains billions of dollars in spending that has nothing to do with the war. . . .
"I understand this is the way our legislature works, but I think it's just sickening," Michelle Matthews of Eagle Mountain told ABC 4 News. She's upset because one of the earmarks reimburses California spinach farmers $25 million for losses they suffered. The losses came when they were unable to sell their crops last fall after Americans got sick and died from e-coli bacteria in a batch of tainted spinach.
Some of that spinach found its way to the Matthew's dinner table. Michelle got sick, but her daughter, Arabella, almost died. Arabella was just two-years-old when she came down with e-coli. She spent nine days at Primary Children's Hospital, had an operation and was on kidney dialysis.
The Matthews have about $60,000 in medical bills now, mostly covered by insurance. She says the family has been assured the spinach grower's insurance company would pay the bills, but no money has arrived. Then Mrs. Matthews read that the spinach farmers stand to gain $25 million from the Iraq war spending bill.
"To reimburse them for making people ill is just inappropriate," Mrs. Matthews said. "It's insane that my tax dollars and the tax dollars of my family are going to pay these spinach farmers for their bad spinach for things that were their fault in the first place."

Bailing out an industry that makes children sick, with taxpayer dollars! Now that's smart politics!
posted at 11:00 AM by Glenn Reynolds

Re: Rolleyes News of The Day

An Iraq spending bill Congress will vote on Thursday has an Eagle Mountain mother angry, but not about war spending. The huge, 124.1 billion dollar appropriation bill also contains billions of dollars in spending that has nothing to do with the war. . . .
"I understand this is the way our legislature works, but I think it's just sickening," Michelle Matthews of Eagle Mountain told ABC 4 News. She's upset because one of the earmarks reimburses California spinach farmers $25 million for losses they suffered. The losses came when they were unable to sell their crops last fall after Americans got sick and died from e-coli bacteria in a batch of tainted spinach.
Some of that spinach found its way to the Matthew's dinner table. Michelle got sick, but her daughter, Arabella, almost died. Arabella was just two-years-old when she came down with e-coli. She spent nine days at Primary Children's Hospital, had an operation and was on kidney dialysis.
The Matthews have about $60,000 in medical bills now, mostly covered by insurance. She says the family has been assured the spinach grower's insurance company would pay the bills, but no money has arrived. Then Mrs. Matthews read that the spinach farmers stand to gain $25 million from the Iraq war spending bill.
"To reimburse them for making people ill is just inappropriate," Mrs. Matthews said. "It's insane that my tax dollars and the tax dollars of my family are going to pay these spinach farmers for their bad spinach for things that were their fault in the first place."

Bailing out an industry that makes children sick, with taxpayer dollars! Now that's smart politics!
posted at 11:00 AM by Glenn Reynolds

No Divorce For You – German Civil Court Judge Denies Divorce, Applying Shar'ia Law

By Beila Rabinowitz

March 22, 2007 - Frankfurt, Germany - PipeLineNews.org - A German female family court judge has caused a national uproar by denying a German born woman of Moroccan descent an expedited divorce on the grounds that the Quran justifies wife beating.

The controversy has yielded headlines in the German press such as, "Judge decides case according to the Quran" and "Shar'ia in Germany?"

News of the decision has spread throughout Western Europe, establishing a precedent as the first instance in which a German judge has used Shar'ia law as the basis for a judgment.

The judge's decision in part read:

"Both partners were from the Moroccan cultural environment…in this cultural environment it is not unusual for the husband to hit his wife as a punishment for misbehavior. The German born plaintiff must be regarded as if she had married the born and bred Moroccan defendant there."

The judge also cited the Quran to reassure the 26 year old plaintiff finds that she had taken into account the threats and harassment, "where the man's honor is bound up with the chastity of the wife, if he is brought up in the Islamic tradition, a woman living according to Western rules is already grounds for divorce."

The woman's lawyer decision to go public with the case yielded immediate results. The next day the judge was removed from the case, with the deputy leader of the Christian Democrat party noting , "This is a sad example of how the conception of the law from another legal and cultural environment is taken as the basis for our own notion of law."

In a recent speech in Denmark noted Middle East authority Dr. Daniel Pipes warned about the effect that the imposition of Shar'ia law on non-Muslim cultures has.

As of this writing there is nothing to indicate that the judge who imposed the Quranic based decision was a Muslim or tied to any left-wing pro-Islamist organizations.

Fortunately, German politicians have reacted with outrage to this ruling with politicians across the political divide calling for further "judicial supervision and investigation" into how such misguided notions of multiculturalism - an act of affirmative dhimmitude, really - have trumped German civil law.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."